It was a Friday afternoon.
The pizzas arrived at 4pm. Twelve boxes. The good ones from the place down the road. Thank goodness someone had remembered the dietary requirements this time. There were balloons. Someone had made a playlist.
The MD stood at the front of the room and said something warm about the team and how hard everyone had worked. He meant it. You could tell.
As I watched the room, I saw what the pizzas were supposed to fix.
The exhaustion sitting quietly behind people’s eyes. The lack lustre energy and slight droop even of people considered to have stance. The way two colleagues avoided each other near the drinks table. The senior leader who checked her phone three times during the toast. The man in the corner who laughed a beat too late at everything, on a slight delay, like someone running a programme that used to come naturally.
The pizzas were lovely, but d’you know what… they changed nothing. Not one bite changed Monday’s operating conditions.
I’ve been finding and fixing the real problems inside businesses for more than twenty-five years and I’ve seen the Pizza Friday promise and how (miraculously!) productivity recovers from the slump earlier in the week.
I’ve seen the well-meaning Yoga version where a Tuesday lunchtime class is attended by eleven people once and four people attended twice.
Or the panacea promise of the mindfulness app that got rolled out company wide and opened by 6% of the workforce.
The wellbeing wall. The fruit bowl. The standing desks. The away-day with the ropes course.
Every well meaning intervention costs money and time away from productive work. None of them ever fix the real cause of the problem and Monday’s operating conditions are where the real cost lives.
The question nobody is asking
We have spent decades asking, “how do we help people cope with the stress that work creates?” or perhaps “how can we manage stress better?”
Therapy. Apps. Yoga on Tuesdays. Pizza on Fridays. Resilience training. Mental health first aiders. All of them working from the same unexamined assumption that work damages people and our job is to limit the harm.
I want to ask a different question
What if we stop spending money managing something we don’t want aka chronic workplace stress and instead ask, “what if work was good for your mental health?” “How do we achieve that?”
I mean actually good. Structurally, consistently and by design. What if we ditch the platitudes, the survivable and the nod to policy? I mean actually good.
What if the environment in which you spent most of your waking hours was one that regulated your nervous system rather than dysregulating it? That gave you clarity rather than consuming it? That made you sharper, calmer, more creative, and more capable at 5pm than you were at 9am?
This is not aspiration, it is operational design that starts with a simple decision to stop spending money managing the symptoms and start fixing what creates them.
When you choose to turn your attention away from sticky plaster solutions and focus on actually fixing problems the upturn in profit and health is remarkable in every way.
I’ll leave you with a thought that when you fix the source, everything else you desire follows. 46,000+ performance audits across high-pressure business environments have taught me to go to the source.
Nodding or just curious?
If you recognise what I’m talking about in this article, the next step is a conversation. I don’t do sales pitches, but simply offer a straight talking session to identify how to fix the real problem that’s holding back even higher performance in your business.
A confidential conversation with me costs nothing, but it might change everything. https://gailbiddulph.co.uk/contact/
Love. Gail.